Decoding the Evolution of Agile Marketing: Insights for Today’s Marketers – CMSWire

By Digital Marketing 06/05/2024 Articles 0 Comments

The Gist

Agile remains popular. As marketers report near universal positive experiences.
Hybrid frameworks are down. For the first time in seven years, they are not the most popular way to be agile for marketers.
Huge challenges remain. As the difference between what support agile marketers get and what they want only widens.

As I reviewed the data from the

A person exercises using an agility ladder while a coach squats down beside the ladder in piece about agile marketing. — Asking people what words they associate with agile, the top result was “flexibility.” People rightfully associate agile with the ability to effectively adapt to change as it happens.Microgen on Adobe Stock Photos

But then what explains the fact that 37% of agile teams report difficulties managing unplanned work and another 33% say their plans change too often?

The Impact of Unplanned Work Requests

Clearly too few agile team leaders are protecting their teams from unplanned work requests. It’s important these leaders be empowered to tell stakeholders “no” or “not until the next sprint.” Otherwise, even the best agile processes can easily get bogged down, creating the challenges I saw in this year’s report.

So yes, while agile is built on flexibility, it also requires some structure to protect against the kind of abrupt changes that really disrupt work.

The Agile Support Gap Remains

One major takeaway from this year’s report was that a substantial and important gap remains between what kinds of support agile marketers find valuable and what they’re actually getting.

For example, 78% found “train the trainer” programs valuable. Another 74% found agile coaches valuable.

But how many agile teams actually received this kind of training and coaching? Only about one-third to one-fourth, respectively. Without this kind of training and coaching, agile teams often struggle to build a robust agile mindset and ensure they’re addressing challenges with agile principles without this kind of training.

In other words, this is a major area where most agile teams can improve. I highly recommend looking at these charts to get some idea of what kinds of support your team should be investing in to best optimize your performance.

The Big Framework Shift

For the past six years, each State of Agile Marketing Report has found that hybrid frameworks are the most popular. I’ve always attributed this to their excellent flexibility. The ability to pick some of the best parts of Kanban and Scrum before adapting them to your organization can get you amazing results.

But now, for the first time ever, equal numbers of marketers reported using Scrum, Kanban and Hybrid frameworks. So what’s causing this shift after so many years of relative consistency?

One hint comes from the data I mentioned earlier showing how few agile teams were getting training and coaching. Hybrid frameworks are powerful but they require more training and coaching to get right because they need to be customized.

It’s possible that more teams are realizing that they won’t have access to the resources they need to successfully implement a hybrid framework, so they’re turning to more structured ones like Kanban and Scrum.

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